BJ Shea

BJ Shea

BJ'S BLOG 09/03/13 "Radioactive Tuna and Twerking"

by BJ Shea,posted Sep 3 2013 7:48AM

Today's blog comes from one of my mentors, Dan Sanders:

I’m confused, totally befuddled you might say. Radioactive tuna were just caught off the west coast of America, there is radioactive water dripping into the ocean off the coast of Japan, and Syria is apparently going to be our next battleground because they have used chemical weapons. So we have radioactive tuna, radioactive ocean water, and chemicals that cause death blowing around in the air.

On the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, President Obama said Martin Luther King would be amazed at the progress we have made in the last fifty years. I’m not so sure. I think Martin Luther King would be very disappointed that opinions about the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman incident were influenced by race instead of the facts about what took place between two men (that’s two men, not one black man and one white man).

I always have issues with the media even though it was home to my career for more than half my life (like a good marriage, love ya’, hate ya’, and love ya’ again). Anyway, today’s issue is with the pervasive use of “MLK.” It seems that no paper can spell out Martin Luther King. I see MLK everywhere. If “initials only” is the new trend, how about WED day--Women’s Equality Day observed on August 26th. Yep, that will go over big.

If all of this isn’t unsettling enough, there’s Sherri Shepherd of The View who says that Miley Cyrus is going to hell because of her controversial VMA performance. Answering Jay Leno’s question about the dance, she said, “Oh, she’s going to hell in a twerking hand-basket. That’s the thing about Miley Cyrus. You see, when I was growing up, it wasn’t called twerking. They got these cute, artistic names for it. That was called a “ ‘ho’ move.”

The general idea of twerking is not as new as some might think.

Comparisons have been made with traditional African dances like the Mapouka from West Africa, which was banned from Ivory Coast television due to its suggestive nature. In the United States, twerking was introduced into hip-hop culture by way of the New Orleans bounce music scene. In 1993, DJ Jubilee recorded the dance tune "Do the Jubilee All" in which “Twerk, baby” was chanted.

I remember when Madonna outraged the world. That passed, and Miley’s performance will be forgotten or not matter, and so will she. But what befuddles me is we are more outraged by the dance of life than the dance of death we are doing with our food, our water, and our air.

In my podcast, the man who saw the UFO debris at Roswell is no longer with us, and the Oxford dictionary has been “twerked” and spell-check doesn’t know it yet. So come ashore at Rambling Harbor. Just don’t eat the fish or drink the water, and for gosh sakes, hold your breath. As the Grateful Dead might have said, keep on twerking.